Move in close to the subject (the baby). Close-ups gets rid of distracting backgrounds and shows the details and gets the viewer in close to that cute baby. One can’t seem to go wrong with close up pictures of those wee ones. Be creative and try all sorts of angles.

Albums about trips are all the more interesting when you have stories and information added to the pages. However, if we use materials that come from someone else’s website, we should only use the materials if the Terms of Use or Copyright statements allow and then acknowledge the source. For photobooks, I suggest you use the final page of the book for your credits page. Here you can record information about sources of information and materials used in the book. Yes, it can be tedious, but it is the right thing to do. It can also be very useful if later you want to revisit a source.

I’m researching some extra information to add to my Margaret River trip pages. On the first day of our visit, we drove down to the Leeuwin Lighthouse, the tallest mainland lighthouse in Australia, and took a tour where we climbed all the way to the top. The views at the top took what breathe we hadn’t already lost climbing, clean away.

For the album, I wanted to record how tall it was along with other interesting facts. I found a great website about Western Australian lighthouses that had a little table of information that was just what I wanted. But – could I copy it and include it in my pages?

At the bottom of the web page I found their copyright information and by complying with their conditions, I can copy the table onto my page (large red arrow). As part of the credit, under the table I put the URL of the source (short red arrow).

Then I needed to go to my Credits page at the back of the album and add the information necessary to comply with their Terms of Use.

In this case, I need to have a copy of the copyright statement printed with the document. The first line (red arrow) repeats the URL and the title of the page where the table is used and the rest of the text is their required statement.

Most websites have Copyright or Terms of Use information deep down the bottom of their pages or on an About page. If you can’t find any statements then the very least you can do is to add a URL to the bottom of the image you are using and on your credits page list the page by giving the name of the site, the URL and the date you accessed the page.

Now you’re home again and ready to put the whole picture set together. Here’s a quick way to get them organised according to the time each photo was taken.

Start off by creating a folder called Originals and inside that create a folder for each of your photographers. Load their images into their own folders. Now create a new folder called Combined and copy each set of photos into it. There is every chance that some of the names will be the same so if your software alerts you to this, make sure you choose the rename file option so you don’t lose any images due to overwriting.

(Windows 7)

From here on, only work on images in the Combined folder. If you mess things up, you can always go back and get new copies.

Next, sort the combined images by Date Taken (not Date Created – more on that another time).

In Windows you can add this field to your Details view by right clicking in the table titles row (1) and selecting Take Taken (2). When this is showing, click on ‘Date Taken’ title in the top row to sort the files in ascending order, first taken to last taken.

That’s it for the short way to go about organising the gang’s photos. The longer ways include adding the name of the photographer to the data properties of their images and renaming the collection for ease of sorting and adding to your final book or album. I’ll address these in later posts.

Last week we talked about keeping the background simple. This week we’ll talk about lighting. Lighting can make such a difference in the way a picture turns out. Natural soft glowing light is the best lighting to use. Why? Because it adds a softness and a contrast between light and dark. It’s similar to the type of lighting that Rembrandt used in his paintings. This lighting is that nice soft lighting that can be found inside a window or outside in some lighted corner, or early evening lighting. It’s that nice soft lighting the adds a soft glow to the picture. This lighting can cause some really striking effects on a photograph when captured correctly. So practice using the lighting without the flash.